For India's Undocumented Citizens, An ID At Last

An Indian boy gets his eyes scanned for enrollment in a nationwide ID project in 2011. Many Indians, especially the poor, lack identification documents, which restricts their access to many government services.

Harish Tyagi
/ EPA

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Some 75,000 babies are born every day in India. The total population is 1.2 billion and climbing. That's a lot of people to keep track of, and the Indian government has struggled to keep up.

Many Indians, especially the poor, don't have any ID, which makes it increasingly difficult for them to be full participants in a society that is rapidly modernizing. But a new project aims to fix that.

"We still have a large number of people in India who don't have any acknowledgment of existence by the state," says Nandan Nilekani, who heads a project that is part of the Unique Identification Authority. "And because they don't have any piece of paper or documents which says who they are, they get left out [and] can't get entitlements."

In 2010, India launched its program to give every citizen a biometric ID number. Armed with laptops, iris scanners and touch pads to record fingerprints, thousands of workers began scouring the country recording individuals' data.

The idea is that if every person's biometric data was collected and linked online, then with the swipe of a thumb, a farmer in rural India or a domestic worker in Mumbai could be properly identified. For many poor people, this could determine whether or not they get government assistance.

The goal is to make everyone more accountable, Nilekani says.

"This project is driven by development considerations. The government is spending billions of dollars on entitlement programs," he says. "This will help it reach the genuine people and reduces diversion and waste in the system."

Registering Millions

At its peak, one million people were registered each day. The program, which is completely voluntary, is set to break its initial target of 200 million by the end of this month.

Despite the progress, there was opposition when the project came up for renewal of its funding. Opponents question the cost of the project. And they highlighted a potential duplication of effort — another branch of the government is simultaneously using biometrics as a way of counting the country's population

But after agreement was reached to share information between the two initiatives, the unique project was extended to reach another 400 million people.

One of those already enrolled is Gulab Chand Sharma. He works at a homeless shelter in New Delhi as a handyman. He also stays at the shelter. He is one of 30 migrant laborers living there who have signed up.

Sharma says he already feels more secure knowing he can identify himself if the police stop him. Also, since he has enrolled to get an ID, he has been able to get a mobile phone, which he couldn't get without one.

"I get many, many more jobs than before. Now people can call me if they need a driver, a mechanic or someone to serve at parties," Sharma says.

Despite the potential benefits, there are privacy and security concerns about the collection and use of biometric data.

Usha Ramanathan, a legal expert in New Delhi, also questions whether this universal ID system is being seen as a magic bullet for all of the problems of India's poor.

"It's being pushed to say that if you get yourself an [ID], maybe you can even get entitlements," she says. "There are no guarantees of services, and they're asking for a re-engineering of all systems to fit in with the UID because the UID has become a solution."

But the head of the project, Nilekani, says at a minimum the ID provides a basic form of personal identification. It will hopefully also provide the infrastructure for more benefits in the future.

"We have designed this identity program as an open platform where applications can be built on this," he says. "But the important thing is now you have a foundation on which you can do that. So we think this will spawn a lot of uses which we can't even comprehend."

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.